Determinism, Free Will, and Law

Even law recognises that sometimes people cannot be held accountable for their actions: pleas of "crimes of passion" or "state of mental deficiency" or "temporary insanity" are seen, if proven, as legitimate "excuses" for actions.

Relinquish your rights to freedom of choice, become a creature of events.
Let the self become devolved into electrochemical actions, in your squishy subterranean brain.
Causing you to shudder and shake to the determined world of the robotic man.
Give not a hoot for the morals you are taught,just obey the desires that rest in your groin.
Tell the policeman" Its not my doing. im only obeying the commands of my genes, my compulsive determined ego".

I don't think it it has to be stark black and white, though I don't mind if someone frames it as such. Am I totally responsible for everything I do. Not really. Someone stepped on my foot while dancing last night. Could I be a more skillful navigator. Probably. I just find better places to dance, where the likelihood of being stepped on is less. It is a matter of judgment of direction I wish to travel.

Each individual has a choice of direction, which are affected by all that surrounds the individual. Sometimes events overwhelm the individual, and that is life. A good sailor can navigate around some storms, but some just overwhelm even the best navigator. And that is life. We try our best, choose our path, and gain skill in navigating, in the best way we know how.

I dont think free willy can be decided on some twat standing on your foot.Its a bit more complicated than that.Free will would tell you to wear steel toe caps, but then you'd look pretty stupid and no one would come near you, so you would not need them but if you had not .....:perplexed:

Quite the point. There are a whole host of factors that affect what I choose to do, what I am constrained in doing (e.g. the availability of steel cap shoes), and the tonnage of the person stepping on me. So it is not really a matter of Free Will. It is a matter of consensus between the direction I would like to go and how it interacts with whatever surrounds me.

Rich

I see man as Godly, with good intentions, and his/her free will determined by this goodliness. Man's freedom is inseparable from his understanding of duty, and freely acting to express that.
Yared

If you had a hundred choices and logic told you to wear size 9 steel toe caped trainers, you could still go bare foot if that random thing called human ability was silly enough.